October 14, 2010

Asexual Forum Recommendation

Not an actual post today–that’ll have to wait until Monday. I’m trying to keep up posting weekly and I think I’m doing pretty well at it given my current life circumstances, but things are likely to be late rather than early for a while yet.

I wanted to post a link to Knights of the Shaded Triangle, which is intended to be a new forum for discussing asexuality which is more of a safe space in contrast to AVEN. If you’re interested in 102/safe-space discussion of asexuality, go over and check it out.

I had not heard of Cakegasm! I did hear about Asexy Place, but I meant to follow it and then… sort of forgot. I’m adding it to my “click repeatedly over the course of the day” bar, though. I agree, there are lots of new forums springing up about now. The way I see it, though, I’d like AVEN to have more competition so that the asexual community gets a bit less centralized. Not that I don’t like AVEN, but I think that if we can get more thriving communities, preferably with somewhat different memberships to AVEN’s, we’ll have more diversity and will probably end up being more welcoming to even more people.

I’d really like to see an active forum with a culture which is not so heavily influenced by AVEN’s take some prominence in the wider asexual community, actually. I see some of those less-influenced-by-AVEN discussions happening in asexual_fandom or in the general Livejournal community, and also in the asexosphere to an extent. But they’re not concentrated together in any one place. If you’re lucky, they’re linked loosely enough that you can leapfrog from one to the other, but I’ve been actively looking for more asexual blogs this week and I’ve found a few that are just not commonly on the blogrolls. And then you need to sort through all the dead blogs, too. I feel like another forum with a largely different membership to AVEN’s might be a really good source of diversity for the asexual community, which in turn would increase discussion, since differences tend to do that. I feel like it doesn’t matter so much which one eventually becomes that, but I would like it to happen. (And who knows? Maybe we can sustain five or six flourishing fora as a broader community. We’re certainly a hell of a lot bigger than we used to be.)

I like Apositive, but I don’t think it’s that space since most of the members are either current AVENites or ex-AVENites. I don’t think there are any active Apositive people who didn’t start at AVEN first. Which is all well and good in its way, but it doesn’t really increase diversity that much.